History never repeats. Yeah, right!

An art installation at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington DC in 2014 shows a bread line of five men waiting at a door to commemorate the Great Depression of the 1930s.

OPINION

Back in the dim dark ages when I went to high school, history was one of my favourite subjects. I did my first degree in it.

Now I get that there are some people who aren’t interested in knowing about the past, but I firmly believe that in order to know where we’re going, we need to know where we’ve been.

Hear me out. One of my main interest areas was the Great Depression. I did a few papers around that and in sociology and I believe that one major cause of the Great Depression was the amount of money being borrowed. If we look back, there was a lot of this buy now, pay later, buy on credit, invest in the stock market idea being talked about in those days.

Well, people borrowed more than they could afford. And why was this? For many families, it was about keeping up with their neighbours. Sure, technology was vastly different to what it is now, but there were still advertisements talking about the latest gadget.

Stop me if this sounds familiar.

I’m not going to name and shame, but the companies offering the ‘buy now pay later’ schemes currently around are doing exactly the same thing as they were 100 years ago. There are a lot of people in debt for more than they can reasonably afford, but these schemes are designed to look attractive. Interest rates are too high and property values are going down, leaving people with less equity in their homes and paying more than they can reasonably afford.

I’ve been there. I’ve got into financial trouble because I’ve needed (wanted) things that I couldn’t afford and ended up going down that route myself. So I understand how people can fall into these traps. But now that I’m doing okay, the last thing I want is to go back down that road. I would hope I’ve learned from my mistakes.

Are we headed for another Great Depression? I would hope not but if what I’ve heard is to be believed, we’re in a recession, which is close enough. Plus there are other parallels from that time in history, such as a pandemic (deja vu, anyone?)

There’s a famous saying. ‘Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed forever to repeat them.’ We need to understand that history to learn from it, or else we will continue to repeat those mistakes.

My point is, if we want things to change, we need to know what went wrong in the first place, rather than risk making the same mistakes.